I wonder: do I lack courage or intellectual honesty?
It’s a question I asked myself after seeing this graphic (or meme, as they’re better known) on an Internet atheism community.
I can say for certain that there are all kinds of important questions that I can’t answer and, I suspect, no one else can, either. Questions about stuff in the Bible, for example. Or questions about why our world is shot through with disease, violence and inequality.
But if you remember where I found this piece of Internet art, you can probably guess – as I did – that whoever created it doesn’t think “God” is an explanation for anything.
If your whole being is trusting in science, then maybe you hope it will eventually figure out everything. And we’ll be left with no creator.
I’m a serious Christian and so that’s not my hope. In fact, I know it will never happen.
Let’s get one thing straight, however. I like science. I like it a lot, primarily because it’s one of the ways God shows us how He works. I have lots of moments where I’ll read about discovery in physics or astronomy and think “Ah, that’s how God did it. Cool!”.
That said, science will never answer the most basic of all questions: Why are we here? What happens to us when we die? And I’m fine with that.
These unanswered questions are important because they remind me that even after all I can find out about God from the Bible, I still know that He is a mystery. To put it another way, God is God. And I am NOT.
“Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track.”
That’s from the Bible, in a section called Proverbs, and it makes sense to me.
So how do you hear God’s voice? One way is to read the Bible and when you encounter something you don’t understand (and trust me, you will), ask someone with Bible knowledge. Or ask me (I’m no expert, but I can give it my best shot or direct you to where you can get a credible answer). Or go online to a website like the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry (http://carm.org/) and ask your question(s).
You can also start attending church. That’s where you’ll meet pastors and Christians who will help you hear God’s voice.
Finally, you can pray. Prayer is a mystery (I wrote about that mystery here: http://wp.me/p2wzRb-9a), but it’s definitely worth doing, if for no other reason than Jesus Christ – whom serious Christians believe is God’s divine Son – prayed all the time.
Does all this make sense? Post your thoughts below and let’s have a conversation.
Frank's Cottage 
As humans, we were created in the image of God, but not created to know everything about our life and this world. That is precisely why we need to be in relationship with him for guidance, strength, and courage to face this world’s adversities. God wants us to seek Him, find Him, rely on Him as the Truth, the Alpha and Omega, and the only One who can make sense of our Christian journeys.
Blessings for a wonderful New Year, Frank!
Thanks, as always, for your kind comments, Martha. 🙂
“I have lots of moments where I’ll read about discovery in physics or astronomy and think ‘Ah, that’s how God did it. Cool!’.”
As long as you realize that there is absolutely no scientific or logical reason for thinking that…
“Why are we here?”The question presupposes that an answer exists. It seems we must first answer the question “Is there a reason why we are here” before we ask “Why are we here?” And religion answers neither of these questions.
“What happens to us when we die?”
Science already has a thorough understanding of this.
1. I couldn’t care less if there is “scientific or logical reason” for thinking science shows me how God works. Why would such justifications even be needed?
2. Science doesn’t answer the questions you pose either.
3. Nobody has poof of what happens to us when we die. Including scientists.
1. Well, in your post you did say “I like science”. Perhaps you just meant that the same way you might say “I like pizza”. Maybe you just meant, “I like the benefits that science gives me”, such as the internet, and painless dentistry, and wide angle lenses with minimal chromatic aberation or distortion (love my Tokina 11-16!)
I guess I had assumed that you meant you “like science” as I do, as a methodology for understanding the world and evaluating claims about reality.
2. Agreed, but the implication of your post was the faith or religion *could* answer those questions. If you concur that neither religion nor science can answer those questions, then we concur on this point. I would point out though that between the two, science does not pretend to have the answers to those questions.
3. No we have excellent documenation about what happens to the body and the brain after death, and consciousness cannot exist without a physical medium for storing memories and evaluting sensory input, so we know that it stops existing at the point.
1. My original comments on liking science stand.
2. I already stated that I have all kinds of unanswered questions.
3. No, this “excellent documentation” isn’t at all proof. There is also documentation that refutes your documentation. Please read Tom Harpur’s “Life After Death”.
1. …without clarification. OK.
2. We both concur that neither science nor religion can answer the question “Why are we here?”, so no dispute.
3. The author you cited is a theologian, not a biologist. Science does have excellent understanding of the process of death, despite your assertion to the contrary.
Would you agree that the brain deteriorates after death?
Would you agree that an injury to the brain damaging say, 10% of it, results in some decrease in conscious function (lets say 10%, just for argument)?
Would you agree that greater damage to the brain leads to greater loss of conscious functioning?
On what basis then, can you or anyone argue that when the 100% of the brain consciousness suddenly returns with 100% functioning?
Its frankly silly to think the brain and consciousness work like that, considering all that we know about biology.
On your third point, you’re writing about science; I’m writing about something far more mysterious, far more spiritual. In the end, life after death does NOT depend on the condition of one’s brain.
So you seem to be confirming that you believe that conscious function decreases as the brain gets more and more damaged, but we suddenly regain full consciousness after the brain is destroyed.
Now, you say science has no evidence of what happens after we die (I still dispute this), but do you have any evidence to support the hypothesis of mind/brain duality?
You are on the right track. A god is indeed a placeholder or proxy for anything that science can not explain.
This means that concept of god needs to change all the time, and it does.
I don’t think there is any point in introducing god to the physical world which is largely a given. Of more importance are our values, our consensus … science can’t explain these, religion has mixed results. A god of the gaps is one model that could be a useful concept.
Thanks for your opinion, George. I’m happy to agree to disagree with you.
Short and sweet! But looking at your questions:
Why are we here? Try asking your parents if you don’t know!
What happens to us when we die? As an analogy, what happens when you fall into a very deep sleep?
As a parting thought, there are some things we don’t even need to know.
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Jesus Christ)
The birds don’t need to worry unduly about these things either. Do let me know should further assistance be required!
I had a quirky philosophy professor at a quirky Catholic college in which you had to take three philosophy courses (in the early 80’s) in order to graduate. She had a Ph.D. from Notre Dame. She believed demons played an active role in this life. Eh. But she said one day that if you show a small child a Hershey’s bar and then hold the candy bar behind your back and say, “It’s gone, it’s disappeared!” the small child will not believe you.
I offer as a provable claim that you can only pay attention to–know–one thing at a time. A legal system makes sense if you look for this rule to be applied by laws, lawyers, etc. It’s very hard to know one tiny little thing like who caused a car accident.
Yet we navigate life smoothly most of the time.
The answer seems to be that you can get by smoothly as long as you do not tamper with the things that are not presently present, pardon the pun. Sr. Mercedes’ rule describes that rule. Just because you can’t this instant see something, don’t assume it’s just vanished.
As usual, my theory falls back and relies on sincerity, but maybe I can define sincerity a bit here. And seriousness. And sobriety.
Let’s say you want to not use your turn signals in your motor vehicle because none of the cool kids use turn signals these days. It might flit across your awareness that you might meet a police officer who has no sense of style, or even a motorist who foolishly relies on your use of turn signals.
Quashing such thoughts with a place-holder-stamping rule like “I don’t see it, it isn’t there, I needn’t worry” will get you out of your present dilemma, but, as the Earl of Sandwich or someone said, that approach tends to accelerate until you are ignoring every twinge of conscience and then you run into an honest person and it all blows up in your face.
I mean, I just described honesty.
I’m having trouble figuring out your point. Must be me. Thanks for commenting. 🙂
“I wonder: do I lack courage or intellectual honesty?”
How do you get an answer to that question? If you suspect your prayer is tainted, where do you turn?
I’ve given you enough to work on. No smilies for you.
One use of the term “place-holder-god” would be describing what happens to things when you’re not looking at them. “In whom we live, move, and have our being.” A creator also sustains creation in being. There would be no reason things shouldn’t just drift apart if this were not so. So faith in God comes down, in life as in prayer, to believing your senses. If you feel guilty, you’re guilty. If you feel confused, you’re confused. If you feel you’re on the track of something very important, for the sake of which you’re going to let all your normal concerns slide, go, sell all you own to buy that pearl of great price. On the other hand, if you feel like robbing your brother because you’ll never get caught because everybody hates him, you know you don’t feel that: you’re telling yourself that but you know it’s wrong, but you figure you might get away with it because God is stupid, but again you don’t really feel that.
Rebellion against God always takes the form of rebellion against creation. We are limited in the power of our rebellion because we can only rebel against one little thing at a time, that little thing that we’re presently sure it’s happening. So to sin against God we have to sin against that little thing, say, a person whom we can accuse of belonging to a defective or subordinate “race” and so treat cruelly. Do we see a defective or subordinate person? No. We have the power, though, to not pay full credit to our senses, but that is enough power to open the gates of hell to us.
PS That opens a door to interpreting “the sin against the holy spirit cannot be forgiven.”
Now here’s a reason you missed my point: I didn’t directly address your core point, nor did you: that quote about “I don’t know”. I think I addressed it better than you did.
When you look through the super-duper electron microscope and see an individual electron (I doubt this is possible), do you now know how electricity or nerve cells work? What do you know?
A classic definition is that you know the thing your senses present as being a member of a certain category, but that this member is here now. “That is a dog.” What is the rest of what goes on in your head? It’s stuff that does not exist. Albeit it may be telling you a lot about important things. “Literature is a lie that tells the truth.”
What does it mean to say something is here now? The old saying, “I know it as well as I’m standing here,” says just about all you can say on that score. When you say “that is a dog” you’re staking your soul on the point.
So that’s the issue of “I don’t know”: if you’re not willing to say “I don’t know” about a million things, you’ll never know one thing. Ask a scientist. “Skepticism” means “scope-ism”, i.e., seeing is believing.
But it’s possible to look at something and not see it. That’s how racial prejudice works.
Let’s take the hard question: is prayer necessary?
I’m saying you know God all the time as the place-holder God who holds things in existence when you’re not looking at them, but at the same time holds you responsible for not taking that “out of sight, out of mind” as a license to abuse (mis-use) creation.
When I say, God wants you to trust your senses, I’m saying that God wants you to trust your body. Now God gave you a free mind so you can praise God in your own way, sing a new song, but this also gives you the power to ignore your senses, such as the sense of guilt when you park your big fat cigarette butt on someone’s nice tablecloth and get it dirty. “Justice is everything in its place,” and we, using our senses, can see where things fit.
The atheist’s plaint against religion would be that it is a drug designed to let people ignore their senses, pretend that they can do whatever they want, using God as a license.
Some religious people regard it as sacrilegious to name God, and who was it was told to take off his shoes because this was hallowed ground, around the burning bush?
Yet God is as close as this moment, because this moment exists and I’m sure not making it exist.
The key question, as always, is prayer. How many times have you talked yourself into something foolish or worse by telling yourself it was God’s will? Didn’t you always find, if you survived, and you must have, you’re reading this, that your mistake was in thinking God didn’t intend for you to deal with things as they appeared but that there was some hidden treasure that you could abandon reality for the sake of?
What exactly can “a pearl of great price”, or the piece of ground in which a treasure is buried, in the other parable, mean? How do you avoid “pie in the sky by and by” religion?
When I’m in a real funk, with only the vaguest sense that it’s for a purpose and I have to endure and wait for the little distant light to grow stronger, that is still more trustworthy than if I tell myself to take a pill, call the therapist, not waste time on such chaotic prayer, etc.
God is the most real thing. That works. The most real thing is God. See?
Now it’s up to you. Do you want God?